Help with Irrigation please.

[CVDon]

I have seen some posts refering to irrigation. I don't recall ever seeing Irrigation as a build option for my workers. How do you do it?

 

[Stilgar08]

Irrigation comes from the earlier versions of civ. Now it means farming. If you build the farm you irrigate the land. It has the same effect, but a different name now...

 

[MrCynical]

Not quite. When you build a farm you get +1 food from it. With the invention of Civil service(?) you get irrigation, which means any farm adjacent to fresh water, or connected to a chain of farms ending in fresh water is 'irrigated'. Any irrigated farms give +2 food instead of +1.

 

[Ray Patterson]

Not quite. The +2 food only comes after biology. At that point irrigation doesn't play a role anymore, you can build farms not connected to fresh water/irrigation with biology.

 

[Stilgar08]

Really??

Sorry for posting wrong info then!

I really thought it is the way I stated! I figured it from the context where they talked about irrigation in the threads... So irrigation is like advanced farming, right? (at this state of the game I tend to automate my workers so I didn't really was aware of that...)

 

[kung-fu-stu]

I played around with this a bit last night after reading about irrigated/non-irrigated farms.
Once you've discovered biology you can build a farm on any flat plains or grassland. But unless this is connected via other farms to a fresh water source (river/lake) it will be a non-irrigated farm.
If you have a chain of farms stretching out from a lake, and you then break the chain by removing a farm (replacing it with another improvement), the now unconnected farms will all loose 1 food production. In some cases this can lead to cities starving.